


Ink in Water

by glasscamellias



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Mild Gore, Non-Chronological, body horror?, lot of death basically, spoilers up to Story and Song, various dead characters mentioned
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-18
Updated: 2018-03-18
Packaged: 2019-04-04 09:33:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14017338
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glasscamellias/pseuds/glasscamellias
Summary: “The people aren’t fed into the Voidfish, that’s ghoulish.”Feeding it papers and files only did so much, and sometimes a more morbid approach was necessary. Fantasy jellyfish are carnivorous, after all.





	Ink in Water

Magic Brian’s Rite of Remembrance was sparse. The Director herself, and Brad, who was pressing a handkerchief to his eyes, for once not smiling and immaculately groomed. (If she thought he would have accepted time off, she would have offered in a moment.) The people who helped transport his body lingering uncomfortably to the side, waiting to be able to leave. Johann was there, but mostly because he had to be; usually he would perform for rites, but it seemed blasphemous now to even consider. Had Brian forfeited his right to a song?

No one wanted to bother for a traitor. Although the Bureau hadn’t been in place for long, there had been a few deaths: a sickness, an accident in a landslide. Nothing like this. Usually there would be eulogies and speeches, but as she looked across their tiny group, it seemed no one had anything to say.

The Voidfish was the only one that seemed in good spirits, its tendrils waving gently. It didn’t have eyes, but it definitely seemed focused on Brian’s body, wrapped in the most perfunctory funereal shroud. Just the bare minimum of spells to keep him from decaying in the time it took to return him to base. She wasn’t even sure that anyone had performed the rituals for his (lapsed?) beliefs; there were a few other drow employed by the Bureau that potentially could have, but no one who would have agreed to it.

She nodded, and they picked up Brian’s body and lifted it to the slot in front of the Voidfish’s tank. The shroud meant nothing to the Voidfish; as the water seeped through it, a tendril unwound it and let it sink, where Johann would eventually retrieve it when he filtered out the...remains. With the murky water obscuring him, Brian almost looked whole again, his pale hair floating in a halo around him, his eyes closed as if he was just sleeping.

The Director heard the door open behind her and turned slightly, to see Killian inching inside. Though he had been a Seeker and she a Regulator, they _had_ known each other, which had been most of her reasoning for choosing Killian for the mission. Perhaps that had been cruel, but she knew better than most his attack strategies and thought processes.

Killian had seen rites before, but never for anyone close to her. In the glow the Voidfish gave off, getting brighter as it gathered Brian towards it, Lucretia could see her face fall. As if there had been some way to prevent all of this, if she had been a little faster or stronger. As if Brian hadn’t been lost to them the day he had left the Bureau.

There was no point in giving a full eulogy, without an audience, but it seemed wrong to leave in complete silence.

“Let’s never let something like this happen again,” Lucretia finally said, watching Fisher envelop her former Seeker.

-

For a lot of people, Boyland’s rite was the first they had ever experienced. There were a lot of suddenly nervous HR and maintenance employees who hadn’t seen the Voidfish outside of their own inoculations, crowding the chambers. People who reasonably wanted to mourn such a wonderful person and didn’t know what that entailed. As his crystallized body was levitated towards the tank, too heavy to carry, the whispers were picking up. It took some maneuvering to get his body inside the slot, accompanied by a horrible screech of crystal against metal, but luckily someone had launched into a drunken memorial speech that masked the sound.

She had worried, initially, about whether it could actually digest a body that wasn’t flesh anymore. Would it potentially do harm to Fisher, would it be unable to perform its memory altering work? For someone like Boyland, whose mark was spread across so many people, they really needed it to work. From across the room, though his face was wet with tears and he was still playing, she could see Johann intently watching for any signs of distress or struggle in his charge.

Briefly it fumbled with the weight, no doubt expecting something much lighter, but it soon adjusted, using all of its tendrils to gather up Boyland’s form. It was hard to say exactly how strong it was, but this didn’t seem beyond its capabilities. It pulled him up into its bell, the pink cloudy but still visible through it, and it began to consume both Boyland and his presence in the world.

The gasps really were a little over the top, she decided, glancing around for a refill of her drink. They should have been crying over his loss, not this. It hardly even looked gory; parts of him were breaking off, and she could see it even through the murk and the Voidfish’s membranes, but there wasn’t any viscera to be had. If that was the only rite most of these people got to see, they were lucky. She could excuse Angus’s look of shock, but the rest of them really shouldn’t have been so fucking histrionic. All this sensationalism instead of honest mourning.

And then the Voidfish began to glow with hundreds of memories being blocked, and it was easier to set aside the song of crystallized limbs breaking off to be dissolved. All of those uninoculated people losing their loved one... All those lives that would be a little less joyful without Boyland... All those _children_...

It was almost a relief to put it out of mind in favor of the next relic.

-

There hadn’t been enough of a lull in the battle for Avi to go searching, not until it was completely over. Everytime he tried to head for the elevators, there was another monster, or rubble in the way, or someone calling out for help. And by then, he could guess the outcome.

If he could have, Johann would have been fighting at their sides. In all their friendship, he didn’t know whether Johann’s songs would manifest as offense or support spells, but either way, he would have stepped up. That Avi didn’t see him once in the fray couldn’t be right. His hopes were already buried by the time he made it to the Voidfish’s chambers.

The broken glass of the tank, water and ichor up to the ankles. Traces of blood, a broken violin. As exhausted and drained as he was, it didn’t take a genius to know what had happened.

He had seen the rites, he knew what the Voidfish did to the bodies they fed it. The rites usually ended before bodies could properly digest inside the Voidfish, a process of days if not a full week, but he’d visited Johann enough to see it. At the time he wondered how disturbing that would be, to have to work beside the tank where a former coworker was being broken down into featureless goo.

It must have taken Johann in the chaos.

His legs failed him before he could take more than a few steps, and he landed with a splash. With numb hands, he reached out to take the violin. Johann had almost never left the base, but Avi had directed enough people sent on errands down to the town where he knew Johann bought his rosin and strings from.

It was probably a fucked up way to think. His friend was no doubt being digested by the creature he had fed and protected for so long, but all he could think was that he really needed this violin fixed.

It wouldn’t bring him or the Voidfish back. He couldn’t play it himself, and he couldn’t think of anyone else that could, if he could be somehow convinced to hand it off to someone else. But he couldn’t leave it broken like this.

-

The Voidfish wasn’t completely carnivorous, Magnus reminded himself for the dozenth time as he approached its chambers. It ate scrolls and files a lot more often than bodies, and never anything alive. (...That he knew of.) Plus it was his buddy! It had sang to him! Obviously it wasn’t going to hurt him. All that animal handling skill had to count for something.

But...he wished he could think of a better way to do this. If the Voidfish got too excited and handsy (er, tentacles-y), he didn’t want to hurt it, even if it was only a punch. It’d be hard to swim with Railsplitter and it nauseated him to think of using it, but what if things got dicey? That’d be the worst for someone to discover his corpse being chewed up in the Voidfish’s head. That and not being remembered by the world below, but honestly being found like that was almost as bad. No one would admire his near-naked body if it was being digested. Well, that and the being dead part.

Holding his breath, he dived into the tank, remembering right then that the Voidfish’s ichor was probably full of blood, and that people might have to drink some of it after he had been swimming around covered in sweat and bits of skin, that sort of thing. Did anyone _filter_ the tank? Considering that drinking out of it was a tenet of this entire organization, that should have been a priority.

As it ‘spoke’ to him, he felt less and less like he had anything to fear from it. His skin went numb where it touched with its tentacles, but it was all above the belt (...not that he was wearing one now), and a cautious check assured him that he wasn’t dissolving from some sort of jellyfish acid or venom. He could trust the Voidfish.

How had he ever thought he had something to fear from it?

-

It was getting harder and harder to elude her pursuers, to stray from the ship looking for supplies, to do almost _anything_. A year had never felt so long, and when she looked down at the pair of bodies at her feet, she didn’t know what to do with them.

Burial was an indulgence and too good for the ones who had, even indirectly, torn away her family. A pyre would only attract attention, when her intent was to make them disappear so hopefully a search party would be delayed by a few days. There weren’t any nearby lakes or rivers to sink the bodies into, weighed down with rocks. She had used almost all of her spell slots in killing them, with nothing left that could have destroyed a body.

And then Fisher floated its way out of the cover of the ship. It could barely understand the need to stay out of harm’s way, not when it was becoming more and more her constant companion. It nuzzled against her briefly, the exposed skin of her cheek going numb before the bodies caught its...eye? It drifted down, tendrils reaching out.

Lucretia stooped to stop it, to distract it somehow but then paused, a memory drifting to the surface. The plane with the artists and the Conservatory, which felt so long ago now. The rush of learning and experimentation culminating in that final performance. How high tensions were, how panicked some of those artists became. How a few of them, sobbing in the throes of their rejection or acceptance, would try to rush to the mouth of the cave, almost always to be repelled. The grief of failure and losing their piece was too much for some of them, and they seemed certain that the light would somehow soothe that pain.

Fisher was still young enough that a whole body dwarfed it, but it floated down on the nearest corpse anyway, tendrils falling on a splayed arm. Faster than she could register, with an unpleasant wet sound, Fisher pulled the arm free, severed at the elbow and drawn up to its mouth. It was hardly the most gruesome dismemberment, and she forced herself to keep watching. She didn’t have the privilege of squeamishness anymore.

It couldn’t be possible that any of the people on that plane had known what was actually inside the cave. If someone had made it in, would the voidfish have consumed them? No one would have remembered the lost students, if it had happened. She hadn’t seen any sign of corpses in their cave, but from the way it was going to town on that body, maybe it wouldn’t leave behind any trace. Maybe she and Magnus had only survived that encounter on a whim and the apparent quality of some carved ducks.

Fisher was a type of jellyfish, more or less. Carnivorous and capable of eradicating anything it ate. And, based on what she had seen of their abilities, she was sure that, if she let it at these bodies, no one would remember them enough to come looking, hopefully buying her some time. They would be functionally erased from the world.

It took some effort to drag them away where they might not be discovered, and longer still for Fisher to digest everything, but it was a survival plan.

**Author's Note:**

> During a re-listen I caught that line and it just stuck with me. So then I had to check transcripts of the episodes before I remembered that it was in episode 41, which was an annoying search honestly.


End file.
